Contributing costume pieces / emotes

[Almafeta]

How complex would it be to contribute costume pieces or emotes?

[Jaguaratron]

Emotes I would say could be complex but then Im not an animator.

 

Costume assets should be quite simple as they have the code so will just need a guideline of whats needed and players can produce assets.

 

If COH uses a bespoke file format for assets as many games do, then a decoder will need to be written in order to facilitate moving the asset from the bespoke format to ones that we can use in programs we have access to like 3DS max.

[Piledriver]

You act like we have something we didn't before regarding these file formats. We don't. The source code has routines for reading in the assets, which I suppose could be inverted to reconstruct the format specs. That still doesn't give us tools to work with unless someone writes them. Sad thing is, reverse engineers already figured out most of that years ago, but nobody was willing to turn that information into tools or plugins.

 

That's not all. The resource files can't just be plugged in and get automagically detected. Far from it! There is a big set of text files that tells the engine where to find those resources and how to put them all together. These files were always in the client .piggs and we've known a bit about them for a long time, but they're a gawdawful mess. They weren't produced manually in an orderly way but spat out by some software (that we still don't have) that arranged things in very cocked-up ways. Truth is: without the software Cryptic & Paragon Studios used to manage those files, that whole file system probably needs to be taken apart and put back together. Manually.